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At school, Elijah Stroud is a computer-savvy fifth-grader at Dana Street Elementary.

After school, he’s GoldenNinja50, an expert Minecraft player, Youtuber and published author.

“I have a Youtube channel and I have a lot of subscribers on it,” Elijah said. “I do live streams and videos and people come on and watch me.”

Elijah records his adventures in Minecraft, a video game that encourages players to mine for and build structures with textured cubes.

He’s been playing for about five years, ever since a friend introduced him to the game.

“I went to my friend’s birthday party and he had the game on Xbox,” he said. “I thought it was really cool looking.”

Since he started playing, Elijah has written and published two books about his Minecraft adventures. His first book, “The Story of My Minecraft Life,” hit number one on Amazon.com and allowed him to host a book signing at Barnes & Noble in Wilkes-Barre.

“It’s about me and my friend Jake, we were in this survival world on Xbox and I just wrote about what we did,” Elijah said.

He published the first book in 2015 and a second, “The Last Day of Minecraft,” in 2016.

“The second one is about me and my friend saving the world from this fictional character that a lot of Minecraft players know,” he said.

Elijah said he just wrote the first book for fun — when he decided to try publishing it, he never expected to end up signing copies at a bookstore.

“I was pretty happy with that,” he said. “I thought it was awesome.”

Elijah and his dad, Chris Stroud, used the money he earned from his books to gather equipment to make Youtube videos.

Elijah’s channel, named after his character GoldenNinja50, recently surpassed 8,000 subscribers and 300,000 total views on his videos.

He has a gaming room in his father’s Kingston home with three monitors, a gaming keyboard, cameras, microphones and lighting for his videos.

Elijah said playing Minecraft has helped him learn coding and even gives him a chance to implement what he learns in his favorite school subject, math.

He’s most proud of two things in the game — a monster-filled “asylum” he and his friends built, and a server he started a year ago where players can gather to play survival and other games together.

He’s also been invited to Minefaire, a Minecraft convention, four times. He attended this year’s convention in Philadelphia to give a presentation as a Youtuber and player.

“You meet some of your fans there,” he said. “I signed autographs and they took pictures with me.”

Elijah’s only nine years old, but Minecraft has given him a pretty good idea what he might want to do when he grows up — aside from becoming an even bigger Youtuber.

“One day I’d like to be a computer programmer,” he said.

Contact the writer:

sscinto@citizensvoice.com, 570-821-2048

@sscintoCV

Christopher Stroud and Christine Stroud, Elijah’s parents

What successful parenting strategy can you share with other parents?

Christopher Stroud: Be involved with your child. Reward your child when he/she does a great job with something. Acknowledge their achievements from anything as small as being polite to someone to getting a good grade on a test at school.

Christine Stroud: Read, read, read! Read to them, have them read to you ... encourage reading!

At what moment did you realize your child was special?

Christine Stroud: The moment he was born and we looked into those blue eyes.

Christopher Stroud: I always knew he was special. We waited a long time before we had a child and that alone made him something extremely special. But in your context I would say when he came home with that notebook full of writing that he did on his own which became his future Amazon book really told me he was unique.

What is the greatest challenge you’ve encountered in raising your child?

Christine Stroud: Co-parenting after divorce.

Christopher Stroud: The greatest challenge has been his mom and I splitting up and him having to go between two homes.